


Perception

by childoftheseawang



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-01-28 11:20:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12605460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childoftheseawang/pseuds/childoftheseawang
Summary: Laura's in the top 5% of Lacrima High's junior year -- 4.89 GPA, straight As in all seven of her AP classes --studies hard, plays (the violin) hard. Carmilla's the new student who's... somehow... brilliantly and effortlessly getting A's in all of Lacrima High's classes? Laura's not happy with her B- in AP Bio, but hey, if this attractive senior is offering to tutor her, it can't be all bad, right? // 50k Fanfic for NaNoWriMo 2017





	1. Prelude 1: School is Mundane

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Exposure](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4988830) by [makeme123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/makeme123/pseuds/makeme123). 



> this is my 2017 NaNoWriMo project, which means that I'm going to post the work in increments (as I edit the first rough draft)

LAURA: It’s been exactly one month since school has started. It’s that perfect balancing moment in the course of the year, where your backpack on your shoulders feels heavier and heavier, but you can still find beauty in the structure of the school and appreciate it as an institute of learning. I feel blessed to be in Silas High. The ceilings are vaulted, high, and painted exactly the same shade of creamy white as the walls, dashed across with barely-visible lines that mark the places where one plank of wood ends and the next begins. The floors are tiled with striated, recycled plastic that swirl in random patterns. The lights play across the walls, casting shade and light and painting the default white different colors, making boring material fresh and new again. 

It’s amazing how this school is designed to make the mundane beautiful, yet still manages to make learning (a beautiful thing) so mundane. The architecture brings out the interplay of light, displaying how it subtly dances across all that we can see and reach... but the teacher's drone makes it harder and harder to keep my eyes open. But that’s not why I’m feeling nervous right now, no, not because math class has been unbelievably hard to grasp, although sometimes, that is true. 

No, I’m feeling nervous today because I've decided I’m finally going to attend a GSA meeting. Wow, not something to be nervous about, right? Especially after crossing paths with its members in this school for… wow, was it two and a half years now? But it is hard. To take on the responsibility of a social group so soon into this school year, after the fiascos of last school year? It’s a risky choice, one that could make or break my emotional health. But I’m still going to take it, because hey, humans are social creatures, right? The AP Psych textbook is not likely to be wrong on that fact.

I climb up the stairwell, feeling the heavy weight of my backpack bearing down on me. A particularly sharp corner of some unknown textbook digs into my shoulder, and there is an obscure ache in the side of my left ankle, twanging where I stumbled over a stack of books in the dark last night. I slide my hand up the side of the banister. It’s worn smooth over the top, its paint glossed over by the polish of hundreds and hundreds of students’ hands as they walk these halls, rushing to and from classes… but if you feel the underneath of the banister, you find resistance. The road less taken, leading to more or less the same place, but in the meantime, there is a difference. You can choose to skim your finger over the lightest top part of the banister, almost taking flight! as you dash up the stairs and reach the top, half out of breath and half-victorious in a competition against only yourself. Or, for better or for worse, you can choose to trace your fingers over the bumps and ridges of an unknown surface, feeling the almost unfinished touch of the unfinished paint job and the sloppy varnish coating forever frozen in a dripping state, as you slowly make your way up the staircase. 

Either way. I’m about to do something incredibly nerve-wracking, and it seems potentially foolish. Time to get it over with. I draw my hands back from the handrail, holding back on to the strap of my backpack. My right hand twitches with the urge to tap out an unique rhythm on the strap. It’s just a nervous tic I have when I get nervous.

I push open the door to classroom 1246 and smile nervously. Little groups of people clump here and there, and I can recognize some people from classes we’ve shared before, but that’s about it. The meeting hasn’t officially started yet, but hey, there are cookies in a jar in the back, so I guess I might as well join the party. Crossing the room to reach the jar of sugary nonsense, I glance around with sugary cookie in hand and find that, surprisingly, (although, it shouldn’t really be that surprising) I recognize a couple of faces, like a senior called LaFontaine who I had been lab partners with in Chemistry, as well as Perry, the junior girl who LaFontaine shared a locker with. The two of them throw their heads back in laughter almost at the same time, Perry’s non-prescription glasses slanting down her face. My heart does that little thing where it skips half a beat, like it’s propelled itself just a bit too hard against the cage of my ribs in an attempt to get the rest of my body to move. I don’t understand why it’s doing it right now, though, because I definitely ship LaFontaine with Perry. I take a bite out of my sugar cookie and make my way through the sea of tables and backpacks and chairs.

Halfway through the classroom, LaFontaine catches my eye and waves me closer. “Hey Hollis! (Get it? It alliterates?) Come to join us, finally?” I offer up a smile and shift my cookie from my right to my left hand as I finish crossing the rest of the room to join the two of them. 

Despite my best efforts to look graceful without tripping on a thousand backpacks, I end up dropping half of my cookie and becoming a flustered mess. I reach the table, visibly embarrassed. “Hey there, LaFontaine!”

“Oh, just call me LaF. Monosyllabic names are always easier than names that are three syllables, don’t you think?” LaFontaine gives me a knowing smirk: “I have to say, I had a really strong hunch I’d see you here sooner or later. Chemistry was the best with you!”

“Oh, lay off her with your name syllable discourse… besides, the two of us both have duo-syllable names anyway, so we’re in the middle of whatever crazy spectrum you’re talking about.” Perry gestures at thin air with the back eraser end of her pencil before resuming her work. She looked up and gave me a vague, absentminded smile before resuming her homework, jotting down her work and filling the margins with notes while penciling in answers like they were no work at all.

“Jesus, remind me to sit next to you if I ever have a math class with you!” I joked with Perry. Without lifting her head, she replied, “Can’t, I’m applying to college this year… so if you haven’t been in math class with me yet then you’ll probably have to wait until college.”

A bit taken aback, I smile anyways. “Really? That’s great! I didn’t even think about early graduation. Good luck with that!”

She puts down her pencil and really looks me in the eyes then, lets me see the side of her that is laser-focused and sharp with concentration like a precisely cut sunbeam. “Thanks! I hope I get into the college I want to: I’ve already drafted my applications and everything-”

Lafontaine cut her off with a finger jab to her cheek. “Shh. Look, the club’s just about to start in five minutes: best not to get into your whole spiel about how you crafted the ultimate extracurriculars list with my *expert* help, especially not with the club advisor keeping one ear open.”

We keep talking, trading snarky observations we’ve made of the shaky, nervous habits of Mr. Klempt, the AP Biology teacher, and the counselors at school, and the random people we see pass by the classroom’s open door in the hallway, in that half-suspended limbo of lunch where you can be in the halls of school without being actually in class learning things. Before I know it the GSA meeting is called to order and it feels no different from any other regular classroom discussion, and my urge to tap out the Rhythm has ceased. I feel perfectly at home, and as I glance sideways to where some girl does a sassy hair flip so that her blonde waves swing in a perfect arc from one half to the other half of her face, I smile. This is where I belong.

Weeks and weeks and weeks fly by, as we start new chapters and new concepts in our classes and take what feels like hundreds of pages of notes, and flip through thousands of pages of information. I grow closer with Lafontaine and Perry everyday. I have people to really talk to and form meaningful connections with, which has not been a true fact since that last spring day when the collective genius of my friend group decided to stop interacting with me. And for the first time in a long time, maybe even the first time ever, I feel loved and appreciated for one hundred percent of who I truly am. 

That is, until one night at 2 a.m. I wake up with a tidal wave of unease pinning me to my mattress like it’s the bottom of the ocean, suffocating me, cutting off the air from my lungs. I check the time. Great. Not late for school. I roll over and go back to sleep, thinking nothing of it. Then, that morning, I come to school and Lafontaine and Perry are just gone. Vanished. Disappeared. And this continues for a day, two days, a week, two weeks. When the teachers take attendance, they gloss over their names. When I ask other people where Lafontaine and Perry have gone, they stare blankly back at me. Finally I decide to seek help from some higher authorities.

“What? Lafontaine? We’ve never had a student under that name… Laura, are you feeling alright?” the school counselor closes my file folder on her lap, folds her hands in a little steeple in front of her face and peers intently into my eyes, probably trying to determine if I’d completely lost it.

“Yes, I’m fine. I don’t think I’m going crazy… but I can’t have hallucinated these people! They were real, right in front of me, telling me things that I didn’t know beforehand, studying for tests and earning grades and struggling alongside me… they can’t just be gone!”

“I’m afraid they are. I’m afraid that you have just been alone… for a very long time… Please don’t be worried, this is a perfectly normal stress response” the school counselor tilted her head a little apologetically as a rippled shadow passes over her face, and I felt a rising sense of unease building through me that I fought hard to suppress.

“Okay, thank you for your time… I’ll be going now.” I gather my things in doubtful fingers, shoot the counselor a little smile which I try hard to make look sincere, and walk out of her office on shaky legs.

I know something is wrong. I can feel it. LaFontaine is real. Perry is real. There are undercurrents here that I do not understand: at the exact moment when the rippled shadow passed over the school counselor’s face, I felt the unease start to build: the same pang that hit me that night that I woke up, and the same pang I felt on my way to the GSA meeting. Something is wrong, and LaFontaine and Perry are gone, and it has something… maybe everything… to do with the school counselor.

At dinner, Dad tries to make conversation. “Hey, Laura. Something’s bothering you. Spit it out!”

I rearrange the food on my plate. “Some girls have gone missing at school but nobody seems to have even heard of them. It’s like everyone just forgot about them!”

“Huh, that’s really weird. Proceed as if it were normal for now. Focus on school, got it? All of this weird stuff can get sorted out later”

“Alright, I guess... I guess I'll go do my homework now...”


	2. Prelude 2: Secrets Underground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A first view of Carmilla

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can be skipped: does not further plot much beyond establishing that Carmilla works for Maman and does violent things like she's an ultra-secret agent

CARMILLA:  
I race up the side of the tunnel, every sense tingling and enhanced to maximum capacity. My imagination runs wild, prepared for any attack, even while our enemies are most likely securely barricaded inside their fortress. My micro suit keeps me perfectly camouflaged against the floor, so as far as we know, if someone shines a flashlight my way, they will find nothing. But it never hurts to be prepared to run, because perhaps they look and scan for readouts that we have not encountered and found ways to counter. Maybe their technology is so advanced that they look and scan for readouts besides the thermal and x-ray readouts that we have learnt to scatter with electronic interference equipment in our micro suits, embedded in every microchip that enables the micro suit to simultaneously be flexible and hard-moving. Our tech department and our crafting department is superb when it comes to this aspect of life, but even they cannot possibly account for one hundred percent of the way we see and perceive the world. After all, yesterday, I had been discovered. I hope the same will not happen this time.

All of a sudden, the tunnel ahead shakes a little. Nobody seems to be here, because I can't detect anything from my monitors, but all at the same time I realize that there might be someone here that I don't know exists, because they are masked on all the detectors of radar that I have. Who could this possibly be? My breath catches in the back of my throat as I try to be quiet and move slowly around. I stretch my arms out and lash out into the darkness, trying to conserve my blood. I hear nothing, see nothing, catch nothing on my overhead displays and monitors. Ah well... I choose to ignore this problem as if this setback didn't happen and move forward to my target. All I have to do today, since I located and scouted the entirety of their base yesterday, is to place a couple of bombs strategically around the geometric structural supports of their base. I quietly slither down the structural struts to its base, slipping on thermal goggles which help me see the minute differences between the warm, heat preserving soil and the colder, heat conducting and heat dispersing metal that formed the struts around it. Aha. Here I go.

"Make sure that you have enough explosive to collapse the entire complex and not just this beam." a voice says into the audio earbuds in my ear. I jump as high as I could, catching myself just in time with my hands before I bounce off the top of the complex. A muffled thump echoes through the complex. I freeze, as searchlights flash over me, and pray that my camouflage still works. 

Nice of Mission Control to finally come in. This is absolutely insane and completely crazy: I had everything under control, but she just had to come in and set off my fight and flight reflexes. Oh no. I would probably have to file a lot of paperwork and attend a lot of revisory meetings now. Why, why did this always happen?

I hold still just in case there was a hint of a shadow from the searchlights sweeping over me, and then, the men controlling those searchlights begin to hesitate in their search and doubt that there really was a noise, or attempt to convince themselves that the muffled thump they heard was just metal creaking or their post settling themselves.

I smile a little to myself now that I was in the dark again. Quickly, I place a couple more more explosives in the most vulnerable parts of the support beams of the complex, and then straighten my back, taking a breather to speak to my Mission Controller. Perry and I had been working together for a while now, and this was awfully uncharacteristic of her. I frowned a little at the thought of rule-following Perry leaning over her microphone in the Mission Control room, looking through one or two of the many microbot micro cameras in the micro suit I was wearing. She had access to the exact same information and visual feed I did, and knew the importance of concentration. Why would she say that sentence in that context? 

"Come in, Mission Control" I subvocalized with my throat, and the microphone picked up on the local mini-vibrations and a computer chip embedded into the hardware delivered my message to Perry, all without making a sound.

"Hey, I'm here, sorry about that. I realize that you were focusing, and I'm sorry for startling you, but I needed to tell you that ASAP because it came straight from the top."

"Who, Maman? Is she here? This project is that important?"

For a while, I heard nothing. I continued walking forward at a slow, measured pace, making sure that the microbots beneath me were able to clean up the footprints that I might leave. Today, nobody was leaving any trails. It would be a clean demolition of the entire complex. Then I heard a little bit of crackle, which let me know that the microphone was on. "Err, well, hello there, my Stone Angel."

I groaned a little internally. Subvocalizing again, I said hello to Maman. I was secretly grateful for the fact that all subvocalization was monotone, or at least, passed through a computer analysis and filter, so emotions couldn't be detected. I don't think I could fake a happy emotion.

"Child, I know you're annoyed to see me. Boo hoo."

"Shouldn't you have somewhere else to be right now? Y’all seem to have done that for the past week. Neither of you has been here for a while. I got used to doing things on my own -- in fact, I got a little paranoid. I thought you guys had gone offline for a while, maybe even left me to hang out to dry."

"I do apologize for leaving you without a line of service, child. For a couple days, that nonbinary redhead from the Tech department called down and said that they were concerned that the opposition had picked up on our messaging system. We also got your new assignment set up, so as soon as you finish this one and we get done with the mission debriefing, we’ll give you a week’s rest and then we’ll start with the next mission’s briefing. But anyway, it looks like we’re all back in working condition now. You're almost done with the mission anyway, right?"

"Nonbinary redhead… do you mean LaF? Right. Glad they sorted that one out -- they’re really the backbone of the Tech department. Yeah, I was just lonely being on my own for a couple of days, but I was productive. This demolition should mark the last task on the list. And this is no great unbearable loneliness compared to those punishments you once gave me."

"Yup, that's true. For what it's worth, I punished you for your own good. Remember! Don't ever fall in love with someone who's not a vampire. Stone cannot love flesh, and flesh cannot love stone."

"Alright, alright, I get your whole mantra." I rolled my eyes, reassuring Maman even though I still didn't believe in said mantra at all. "Can you get Perry back on the cameras and detectors now, so I can finish my mission, and then we can talk?"

"Fine, see you at the debriefing meeting after your mission, Stone Angel. I'll be looking out for what you're doing, so no pressure. Maman out."

I sighed a breath of relief. Talking to Maman was always terrifying because she was my sire. With one flick of her finger, she could reverse the dark magic that made me a vampire. And that would be horrible since it would instantly revert us to our initial states, and then age us forward. Essentially, repaying us by making us relive every moment of our lives in fast forward, with the aging that happens. Once, I saw Maman revoke the vampiric status of a thousand-year-old vampire. It wasn't pretty. First, she aged forward until she was a tiny, little grandma. That took thirty seconds. It represented three hundred years. In another thirty seconds, she aged forward until she looked like a shrunken, three-foot-tall kidney bean with a lot of wrinkles and weird orifices sticking out of it. In another thirty seconds, she lost all ability to regenerate tissue and began breaking down, maggot larvae hatching out of her skin. In the final seconds, her consciousness seemed to re-emerge from the mass in one last, final, silent scream, before she disappeared completely into thin air. I hope that she wasn't conscious during the whole thing, but knowing the cruelty of Maman and the even more excessive cruelty of the world, it probably wasn't true. She was probably conscious during the whole thing, withdrawn into herself in fear and pain. She probably felt her mental facilities become eroded away, felt the kiss of death lap at her heels, and just like that, her story fell apart, unraveled like a destroyed node of wires at her feet.

Lost in my own thoughts, I walked forwards some more (Just how big was this complex again? How have we not already reached the other end and the other set of structural struts that need to be blown up?) before I thought to check in with Perry again. Geez, it’s been a while… I almost forgot about the security protocols for this type of thing. 

“Perry? Five-minute status check.”

“Status checked. Good lord, I was just about to initiate the panic countdown. Keep on your toes, Maman is still monitoring us from the background so we can’t be any sort of lenient, got it?”

“Copy that, Mission Control!”

Just then, a flash of light streaked across the left side of my field of vision. A fourth of a second later, I heard a giant booming sound that would probably not register on a human’s ear detecting auditory sense. But vampires had a much larger range of hearing. I had earplugs made of microbots inserted a while back to prevent this from happening, but it looks like it doesn’t protect me from one hundred percent of the problem. I hear microbots fizz and fade. Uh oh. This isn’t good. I start running as fast as I can, scattering the rest of my explosives around the structural struts which suddenly loom up ahead of me. Time to hightail it out of here.

“Report status, Mission Control. Is everything working? Can you isolate the origin of emission of that sonic wave or analyze the damage?”

“Status unclear, give me a second, the microbots are recalibrating. Did you put on two layers? Your outer layer registers as code 4XEFL-LA-A. Microbot pieces 256-304 in the ear protection unit have burst, and the microphones in some of the microbots have also been neutralized. They will have to be reconstructed later. We recommend that you activate the layer switch for those microbots whose microphones have been damaged, so your suit can operate at maximum efficiency. We will continue to monitor the situation, code orange, code orange, I repeat, code orange is a go. Your outer layer has just been replenished with inner cell microbot pieces 462-510.”

"Okay, that’s a lot of fancy language from you, Mission Control. But I think it's fixed, because I just felt a couple of microbots shift, and new earplugs forming, and wait… yep, an entire patch on my arm is being reshaped. Alright, it’s just finished. Is it fixed?"

"Yeah, nice, the microbots automatically made sure that the display operator was repaired, too. Cool. That was really really close. Don't let that happen again."

"Yeah, for sure, for sure. Won’t let that happen if I can help it. I’ve just deposited the last explosive. Do your stuff."

“Alright, starting detonation. Run out of there. We’ll see you at mission debriefing.”


	3. A Typical(ish) Start of the Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We follow Laura as she wakes up and goes through her typical morning routine. She meets a mysterious stranger who we already know... (^_−)☆ *winks*

LAURA: Routine is the saving of me. Everyday I go through the same rounds, the same steps. It clings to me like the comfort of an old, worn sweatshirt, filled with memories of past times and interests. There are no exceptions, only the uniform comforts of a full planner and a calendar app planned down to the last detail. Some say monotony is sad, dull, unfulfilling. They are fools, those who question the rationale of autopilot. Only the slow monotonous grind can truly lead to any degree of success. The shrill clicking of my phone alarm goes off inches away from my ear. I flinch awake, eyes blurry from sleep. Groaning, I sweep up my phone and shuffle down the hall, my alarm still blaring. The code that I wrote prevents the damned thing from shutting off if I don’t bring it within one and a half feet of my toothbrush, brush my teeth, and then do three math questions. An odd combination of fail-safes, but one that works extremely well to force me into action out of bed.

Shaking out the kinks in my back, I reach for my toothpaste. There’s no point turning on the lights — all they would do is flicker weakly. Routine. I’ve done this and woken up this early so many times that it’s second nature and instinct to perform my morning routine with my brain absent, body on full autopilot. Glancing in the mirror, I make sure that my face is presentable and that my hair isn’t too wild. Smile check? Do you look like a zombie who just learned how to contort their face into a grimacing caricature of a smile that was easy in a former life? No? Thank god, I look decent. Shrugging, I splash some more water on my face. I finish my morning routine by drying off the splashes of water on my face with the front of my pajama top and walk back to my room, slowly opening up the window.

It’s still dark outside- tends to be that way at four o’clock in the morning. Somewhere along the way I’ve shifted from sleeping late to just… waking up early? They talked about chronic sleep debt in health (an unweighted course I was forced to take as a mandatory part of the freshman curriculum) but it’s not that bad. As some Tumblr quote with no source would tell you, “It’s not the length of a life that tells you it’s well-lived, but the beauty that it contains within.” And even a broken clock is right twice a day: that quote, in this context, is definitely right. The pale, almost-blue-tinted glow of the streetlight across from my window scatters, diffuses in the early-morning fog. Silently, the misty air wisps and pools in invisible eddies and currents in the air.

I pick a sworl to look at and watch it with a strange fascination as it rises and falls, settling in a small corner of the sidewalk and spinning, now languidly, now furiously fast. I blink, and find that I have lost the wisp of smoke. Perhaps it has spun too fast and condensed inwards into a water droplet. Or perhaps, it has spun too slowly and become once again part of the general aesthetic, the atmosphere of fog. In the morning, there is nobody to tell you who to do. There are no yells and cries of dismay, regret, despair, or worse, anger. There is no stress over homework, no grade below the ninetieth percentile, no class rankings to worry about, no competition against fellow human adolescents of my same age. Instead, in the morning, there are golden moments, full of joy, and there is rare peace and silence. Soon the sun will come up, slowly, painting the sky careful, precise gradients of increasingly vivid colors. But that time will come half an hour later, and I have no time to watch the sun come up. There is an essay to write, and a debating brief to prepare. There are things to do.

Rearranging the clutter at my desk, I sit down. I say that I will clean my room, but then I always clean a few areas and then give up. At times I feel ungrateful because at least I have a room, my dad says, that is three times the size of my cousin’s room in China, and that I should be grateful that it even exists, that I am not homeless out on the streets. He is right: my room is big, and filled with many wonderful things, but there is really no time to clean it up. I move a stack of yellow lined paper to my left so that I have room for my laptop... and my essay beckons. There is no time to write what I love; there is no time to love what I write, just me and my pencil bent over a piece of smudged binder paper that has slightly bent corners and three slightly-ripped holes. It’s not my best work, but it’s not my worst yet either. This is for my favorite class: AP English Literature, but the course gives so much homework that there is quite simply no point in putting the extra effort in for it to look one hundred percent pristine. A previous version of myself from the past would have huffed at me and crossed her arms: after all, the general care a person puts in their homework is indicative of how much they care about the course. But that didn’t mean that I had enough time to put devotion into all of my work for all of my classes: it would just be impossible. I turn off my brain: autopilot is key. Time to power through the rest of this and read through it to tell if it makes sense. Half an hour later, I have a sore hand, an essay that is completely done and filled with smudges from my hand brushing against the lead markings, as well as the opportunity to catch the end of the sunrise.

Opening a side drawer, I take out my journal. At one point it had been just a plain white book, but at this point it’s covered in stickers and doodles and designs, even on the cover. I hunt for a pen in a messy drawer of writing utensils. Opening the balcony door, I follow my previously-marked and indicated roof tiles in a staggered pattern up to the tip of the house. There I could see the majority of the sky and my view is barely obscured. The air is positively frigid, and I can almost feel it chafing against my skin, sucking away the moisture out of my almost-dry hands. Darn it, I forgot to put on gloves. My hands are going to be really chapped. At least this time I remembered to put on a coat. Routine. It’s falling apart, as usual. It’s all fine, I tell myself. A little variation is normal in any experiment, it doesn’t mean that you are losing control. I sit on the top of my roof on the top of my house, trying not to give in to the urge to scream really softly in the back of my throat, and I try to feel like I'm on the top of the world. Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap. The brick mortar beneath my right hand’s fingers is a bit crumbly, almost as if it were a slightly stale cookie. I throw my left hand back through my hair, trying to brush through my thoughts, but it doesn’t work. Instead, the cold wind whooshes past, looking for anywhere to swirl into. I let my hand fall back to my side, so I can stay warmer. Ow. I’ve scraped it on the brick mortar… typical. How clumsy.

The sky lightens from a dark black to a dark navy, the streetlights shining through just enough to illuminate the pale white pages of the journal I have precariously balanced on my left forearm. I stand in the midst of this color, feeling just a little inadequate, but taking in all the colors all the same like I do every morning. I can memorize the sequences of the sunrise: its patterns a routine just like mine. Scribbling away, pencil scraping against paper, left hand still smarting a little from the scrape wound, a page of my journal fills up. I have pages full of wild white noise, full of scribbles of plot twists and details that will probably never be realized. Full of turns of phrases come up with on the spot, that will probably never be used in anything. But I still collect these phrases, searching for a chance to reconcile the need I have to record beauty with my inner desire to squirrel myself away and never expose myself to the world. The thought of releasing all my thoughts to the world, scattering them to the four winds? I will not hesitate to admit that the thought is pretty daunting.

Sharply, I inhale in the crisp morning air and blow out the warm water vapor and carbon dioxide mixture from my lungs, admiring the silvery whitish mixture as it swirled through the air out After this dark navy color, it will change briefly into a deep blue and then to another, lighter shade blue, possibly a mix between aquamarine blue and pthalo blue, like the time I decided I was going to get into paint sculpturing and emptied the two half-full, half-empty watercolor tubes out onto a couple pieces of tissue paper. You can imagine my dad wasn’t too happy about that: in a twenty-four piece set that cost seven dollars, that was almost like a quarter gone.

After a quarter gone for no reason, the sky changes shades and slowly turns the color of the silver lamppost, and then it glistens, widens in breadth and becomes a light yellow like the faded yellow of my eighth-grade ferrite composite-fiber science project. I don’t have any more time to watch, but I know from there, the horizon will eventually bleed into a magnificent warm orange before second period, so ready to lead me in charging and seizing the day and so beautiful that it’s all that I can do not to burst into a huge, face-splitting smile. As it is, as I climb down from the marked roof tiles I let myself have one small grin. Normally I'm all for using phones everywhere we go as extensions of us, the modern human, but in these moments, like watching the sunrise? I just need to take a break from the digital world, which will never be able to capture the pure, raw, special beauty of the sunset in all of its glory.

Like the sun, I’ve got routine, and it’s burnt into the back of my brain. I’ve stood out here for about fifteen minutes, so now it's time to go back inside with my chapped hands and my chapped lips, and pack my lunch for today. I snap the journal shut, a piece of ambiguity doodled down hastily inside in neat but still half asleep handwriting, and carefully close the door behind me.

My dad has woken up. Smiling at me from where he stands in the kitchen, with his hair ruffled up and sleep-tousled and his feet stuffed in pink fluffy bunny slippers, still in his pajama bottoms but matched with a cardigan, he looks radiant. “Good morning” I say, offering him a smile that he returns. He makes breakfast for us and I make myself comfy at the table, after I’ve set the table and set the distance between the eating utensils about as accurately as possible. My dad is the best in that he understands the need that I have to work hard. I don’t know what he would say or how he would react if I ever came out to him, though, and lately, for these past few years, we’ve been slowly growing apart.

With a piece of toast in my mouth and a coffee thermos in my hand, I grab my coat, throw my studying supplies and my textbooks into my backpack, and start heading towards school in a slow jog, bag bouncing against my back. The bus station is a five minute jog under my feet, and as the side of the road streams by I get a chance to warm myself up and forget the cold. From there, it’s a twenty-five minute ride straight from the bus station to school.

The public shuttle bus for 5:00: the bus pulls up in a squeal of exhaust, the fumes on the back of my tongue mixing a familiar scent as I inhale them along with the sweet morning air. Slowly the rusty doors creak open. I get on, swinging my backpack over my right shoulder, and scan my transit card. There are a lot of empty seats but if I just pick one and sit down, I’ll just sleep past my stop and end up god knows where and probably either kidnapped or dead. So among the three people who are on the bus, I choose the closest one. Gesturing at her to move her bag aside, I sit in the vacated seat. I adjust myself, and then I smile at the girl beside me.

“Hey, I'm Laura. Good to see you? Again, you should know it’s one of the more perfect places around campus (or, technically, campus bus) to fall asleep in, especially when it’s in the morning and everyone’s silent and deprived of energy. There’s nothing anyone can do to escape the wrath of the homework. Nobody is able to finish without going crazy or sacrificing your personal supply’s best, The incoherency of my internal thoughts are what’s just real like…” I broke away as I realized I was rambling without making sense at all. The girl looked at me like I was crazy. Okay, so maybe I was still basically asleep. After a couple seconds of awkward silence were over, I decided that I probably needed to clarify what I meant. I did an awkward smile, and tried again. “Sorry, hi, I'm Laura. Wake me up if we get close to Silas High. I'm going to take a nap.”


	4. The Reconnaissance of a Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And we get Hollstein's first meeting from Carmilla's point of view.

CARMILLA: After the excitement and the near misses of detonating an entire enemy compound, I need some low-profile missions. Accordingly, Maman’s had me relocated to a school, and it seems pretty ordinary. Silas High. I'm almost certain that I'm just on a standby mission, a side goal. After all, she’s given me no instructions beyond “keep an eye out for anything strange”. I lived in this part of the country a hundred years ago, but then everything was different, with ranches everywhere and basically nothing else. I have no expectations, but I know the schoolwork will be a piece of cake. After all, a vampire has no need for sleep if they have enough blood to power themselves through it. And I spent the eighteenth century working for Maman at night and, by day, reading in France’s magnificent libraries where they discussed philosophies and grand, nation-building dreams. With a glass of heady, multi-toned blood in my right hand, I would pore over those books everyday and teach myself the things that I had been forbidden to do.

Nobody paid me any attention, probably because they were too afraid to. At the time, rumors abounded of the shy young girl in the library who would never grow any older, who had apparently survived her execution for witchcraft once by sitting up, snarling, and ripping apart at least eighty men. All I can say is that I’m not proud of any killings that I’ve done in the past, but it was necessary for me to continue to perform my job right now in the present day.

And right now I'm a student, riding the public bus, looking and acting the part with my black backpack next to me on a seat and with a hoodie on. I dig around in my backpack for a while and pull out my phone and earbuds. Scrolling up through my playlist, I choose one and hit play. I guess this time around, despite the many, many differences, I'm still going to start off this mission by being the shy antisocial type.

It’s early morning, about an hour and thirty minutes before school begins. There are little to no people on the bus, which is predictable given the fact that this is a suburban neighborhood whose members probably all have their own cars. The kids here probably have the habit of riding to school in their loving parent’s car after waking up late. Only two other people besides me are on the bus. I shrug and kind of smile to myself, soothing down my antsy nerves. I’m still too hyped up from the tension of last mission… and you need to be patient rather than on edge for reconnaissance. I sit back and listen to the music streaming through my earbuds: something by Troye Sivan. _In total darkness I, I reach out and Touch._ I lose myself in his vocals.

The bus wheedles up to another half a dozen stops. I click through half a dozen songs too. Then, the bus squeaks to another stop and unlike all the other stops before it, slowly, its old doors creak open. I smile wanly at the one passenger that gets on. She has her hair up in a messy bun that manages to look lazily effortless. Over her right shoulder is a backpack held together with hodgepodge patches of duct tape, leaking stories about the past from its busted zipper on the side. With one earbud dangling out of her left ear, she looks like a student from a school specializing in fashion and design. She wears androgynous clothes, with a distressed black coat on top of a light grey vest with a geometric owl design, all on top of an off-white blouse that fit her curves well. The design is asymmetric and ragged, reminiscent of the dresses of the 1980s but in androgynous form. From my sample size of three people on the bus so far, only one was dressed this well for school. The other two were just in typical hoodie and jeans or sweatpants and t-shirt. She has the entire bus to choose from, but for some reason, she moves towards me, smile a tired smile, and ask if she could sit down. With a strange urge to get to know this girl, I nod and pull down my backpack from the seat next to me. I put my earbuds back in and leaned back. Less than a minute passes before she literally p o k e s me in the side. Did I mention that I really really really dislike physical contact? I literally jump out of my seat. Then she says a series of words that really just don’t make sense. Something about homework. Or possibly about buses?

 _What's wrong with you?!_ I wonder why the girl is talking nonsense. The girl must have realized she was speaking gibberish, because she takes a deep breath, does a tiny half-shake thing with her head that I guess is an attempt to reorient herself, and smiles an awkward smile at me. I'm considering putting my earbuds back in when she tries again.

“Sorry, hi, I'm Laura. Wake me up if we get close to the school. I'm going to take a nap before we get there.”

I shrug. Seems reasonable enough, even if it doesn't occur to her that she could just use her phone to set an alarm instead. If I were still human and still needed sleep, I probably would steal a couple extra minutes on the bus to sleep too. Even before the bus got to its next stop, this girl (Laura? She said her name was Laura?) had fallen right asleep. I can't help but glance over curiously at her, the small sleeping figure huddled up next to me. I wonder what life she leads, whether she's a good student, whether she has a boyfriend (or, better, whether she has a girlfriend). I wonder why she makes the effort to dress so well. She has a pair of sleek black earbuds in her ears with pink and blue cupcakes on the sides. Swaying with the motion of the bus, I wonder how she could sleep. More than anything, I wonder why she was catching the bus like me instead of going to school with a parent. What is her story? Gazing at her sleeping body, head lolling around to the rhythm of the bus’s wheels, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was being a predator, that I was being creepy. Ah well, I’d have to get over it. I had done much worse things in the past, way worse than simply looking at another girl. Even if this girl in particular smelled delicious, like flowers and freshly heated milk and the slightest tinge of blood complementing it all. I could just vaguely make out the outlines of blood, pulsing through the slopes of her shoulders and neck. Where the skin was the thinnest at the nape of the neck, I saw the thinnest of capillaries outlined in spidery traces on this beautiful girl’s skin. The musk of human pheromones rolled off of her in waves and _I was leaning in and oh god no, not now, this can’t be happening, you’re three centuries old and you should be able to control this, you’re not a vampire teenager anymore, you can control your biological hormonic urges, come on, you’re better than this, blink hard twice and slice your nail down the length of your palm and you should be fine_ AH!

You jerk awake with a little yelp, hoping that the girl didn't wake up in the meantime. Damn. What an intensely vivid dream! You can’t tell if you’re relieved or annoyed that you fell asleep. How close were you to the school? About seven more stops. Phew. That was really, really close. And weird, considering you're a vampire, and you're not supposed to fall asleep if you don't want to. You glance at her again and are drawn to her coat-covered wrist, sensing a scrape or a paper cut on her wrist. You frown. It’s not a cut, because it would bleed and smell more: but who scrapes their wrist? You almost pull back her sleeve to get a better look at her wrist before you remember that you’re on a school bus and you don’t want to blow your cover. 

So instead you wonder some more, while Hayley Kiyoko plays softly in your ear. Wondering away the time before you get to school, wondering away at this stranger who will probably melt away into the student crowd once you get to school. You wonder if you'll see her everyday from now on, next to you on this bus. Somehow that doesn't feel like such a bad idea.


End file.
